Community Rules

Be Decent and Civil

It’s fine to disagree with people but please remain respectful. Don’t insult people or their children, call people names or bring rudeness into it. Absolutely no bullying or personal attacks including going through someone’s post history to find past comments to use against them.

Basics include upvoting comments that add to discussions and downvoting off topic comments. Please don’t downvote people just because you disagree, diverse opinions are what makes our subreddit great. If someone is breaking one of our rules report the comment, so our moderators can remove it.

Don’t Create Inside Drama

Remember you are speaking to another person. If you are having issues with another user, message the moderators to help you deal with it and do not fight in the comments. Moderaters have discretion to remove comments as needed. Typically this action will come when one or more comment threads have moved off topic and/or have become contentious, rather than respectful sharing of information and opinions. If you are having issues with the sub and want to make a meta post, please message us first.

Don't Create Outside Drama

Please don’t pull issues with other subs into our community. No good comes of cross-sub wars and we don’t need those kinds of issues in our sub. Crossposting anything from /r/parenting to any other subreddit might result in a ban and may result in the original thread being locked.

Take Advice With A Grain Of Salt

Reddit is not the best place to get legal or medical advice. Your post may be removed or redirected. Requests for specific medical advice or diagnosis are not permitted in the subreddit because even medical professionals will not diagnose without examining the actual symptoms of a person actually present in front of them. Please refer all such questions to your pediatrician. If you believe your child may require hospitalization, please dial 9-1-1, your local emergency services, or call your pediatrician's emergency number.

Only Parents or Guardians May Post

It’s okay for everyone to comment provided it’s on topic and contributing to the discussion. Make sure you indicate that you're a parent (or expecting) or guardian to avoid confusion if it's not obvious! If you aren't a parent/guardian, or are a parent who would like to answer questions for non-parents, please visit /r/askparents. We also have a weekly Ask Parents Anything thread for your convenience.

We Discourage Linking Within Posts

Unless it helps you illustrate a broader point or be very specific in seeking advice, we only allow link posts sparingly from active members if they promote discussion. You must be a participating member in our community outside your own submissions and have submitted comments outside of your own posts before you're allowed to link. When linking please provide a description of the discussion you'd like to have about the link you're sharing. Please do not link to your blog, other active Reddit threads, or Facebook.

We Do Not Allow

Spam, self-promotion, fundraising, media marketing, surveys, petitions, donation requests, affiliate links, media requests, or any post seeking to use our community for profit, research, SEO/digital marketing, copypasta, low-effort content, etc. We do not allow missing person reports as we can’t verify if the person is really missing. Please report all such posts. If you are interested in advertising on reddit, please consider taking out an ad.

Just food for thought. I'm not a teacher, and I'm not sure why the estimates for back-to-school purchasing aren't enough to cover the whole year (not enough storage space? stuff like markers and glue sticks dry out?), but I've seen this mid-year supply drought (usually with Kleenex) several times now at my son's school.

Teacher's aren't made of money and times are tough. They're often left with two options when running low on critical items: pay out of pocket or spam kids' backpacks with pleas for donations. This year my wife and I decided to be proactive and e-mailed the teacher to see if she had any needs. The response was something along the lines of: We "desperately" need glue sticks, dry-erase markers and hand sanitizer...but don't feel like you need to get all of those things...

This last part is especially heartbreaking since the entire wishlist came to less than $50 US. It's sad how that amount of money can make such a big difference. My wife and I aren't made of money either, but it's a totally reasonable slice of our holiday gift-giving budget. (And let's face it, stocking our son's class with hand sanitizer is probably worth twice that when we don't get sick later.)

Not only that, if your kid's teacher is as awesome as ours is, you'll get an entire class' worth scribbley first-grade thank you notes that they did in place of their daily journal. :-)

Disclaimer: As I said, I'm not a teacher. There's a good chance I don't have the whole picture, here. Certainly not all schools/teachers/districts are the same. If you're a teacher, chime in!

It is probably because many (edited from "most") families cannot afford that.

$50 may not seem like much to some folks, but a lot of us are struggling and an extra $50 just isn't in the budget.

It's sad, especially now with all the schools' budget cuts and such.

I mean, if that's a voluntary $50 instead of mandatory, I could see that working out, at least better than nothing anyway. But otherwise, if it's mandatory, that's probably why more schools don't do it.

I didn't mean me personally, just in general that there are a lot of people that would be financially hurt if that were mandatory.

However, backpack aside since I doubt the school provides that, I probably only spend maybe $20 on school supplies. Few packs of pencils, two or three boxes of crayons, some folders, some glue sticks. My child is only in first grade though - I imagine as the years go on it gets more expensive what with book covers, school projects, etc.

This seems odd to me. I've seen schools take direct donations of supplies or they take money through some indirect means (specifically taxes), but never collect money directly for general expenses. Is this a public school?

I would absolutely love if my kids school did this. We spent almost $300 on school supplies and then $268 on school fees. Every year the list of crap they "need" for school gets longer. Not to be all old grandma I walked 100 miles to school barefoot in the winter but in my day I got some pens, pencils, paper, a binder and a ruler and that was it. I don't know how some families even afford sending their kids to school, we helped out one of my daughters friend and paid her school fees and the mom has just been paying us back as she can.

My daughters school list was ridiculous. She's in pre-kindergarten and needed 40 pencils, 8 pearl erasers, 12 glue sticks, 3 types of crayons, a ruler, 4 note books, 4 folders, paint, 6 hi-lighters, 6 dry erase markers, 2 kinds of storeage bags, backpack, lunch box, plus all of the tissue, soap ect that they wanted. On top of that everything on the list was asked for by brand name.

There is no way that she needs all of that stuff. She only goes 4 days a week for 4 hours a day which includes "lunch", recess, and programs like gym, music, and art. I have 0 issue getting her stuff that she needs or that the classroom needs but 40 brand name pencils and 12 brand name glue sticks per student (their are 20 kids in her class) is too much. The total cost of everything I sent with her on her first day was over $100.